"So Janet seemed to think. I have heard no more of it. And he seems content."
"Contented people," she snapped, "have fat souls."
"I didn't say self-content, my dear," he explained mildly. "But he is willing to live a life of obscurity—for the sake of an ideal. That's rather great, Theresa. With his scholarship and his power he might have made himself a name."
"Then he ought to have made it. Anybody could teach those stodgy boys." Yet his own words came back to her, mingling with the water and the wind, and once more she gave assent.
"That's just what he does not believe. Does a preacher think one soul of more value than another? And should a teacher? That is what he asks, my dear—and answers. And I am proud to call him my friend."
She went to bed, to lie there cold and stiff, her thoughts hideously and mercifully formless, until at last, out of that mangled heap of indistinguishable things, sleep came to her as gently as a fallen feather.
Morning brought her a letter from Morton, and her sores were healed. It was the letter she had wanted. It told her delicately something of what she seemed to him, and it revealed the aspirations of the man; it implied that they had been blown still higher by the bright strong breath of her spirit, and it satisfied the ancient hunger that, last night, had shrieked ravenously for food. No one else had ever claimed her for his inspiration, and as she put the letter in her breast, the action was like a gage flung down, though the name of her enemy was not cried.
The next day, flowers came, and then another letter, and after a few more days, more flowers, and, lying among them, a little missive, telling Theresa that these but heralded his own approach.
"Have you heard the news?" Neville said, when she entered the office that morning.
"Which news?"